Category: Books

This month I visited the ‘War Remnants Museum’ in Saigon, formerly the ‘War Crimes Museum’ (and technically in Ho Chi Mihn City nowadays). The ‘war crimes’ of the USA, French and the South Vietnam regime are graphically illustrated with photographs and relics of torture, imprisonment, indiscriminate bombing, careless killings and trophy-collecting. It of course completely ignores the murders and atrocities committed by the NVA and VietCong. A superb retrospective of photographs by journalists killed in the conflict particularly shows the agony of the US war effort, whilst again the North Vietnamese photography was of cheerful NVA soldiers, sturdy peasants and so forth. Hardly balanced, and casting the USA particularly as the baddies. The Museum of the Revolution in Havanna does much the same, although with hilarious lack of credibility in places.

In my reading around the Vietnam War, one US politician looking at the corrupt and oppressive South Vietnamese regime wondered if the US was actually fighting on the right side. The reality of Cold War proxy wars was generally that the US would back unpleasant right-wing regimes with dismal human rights records, whilst the Russians, Chinese and Cubans would back insurgencies by ‘popular’ leftist groups equally comfortable with violence and murder. To the peasants and teenage soldiers forced to fight or flee it would be hard to tell who the good guys really were.

On holiday I read the classic ‘We Were Soldiers Once and Young’ by Moore and Galloway, concerning the first major bloodbath between US and NVA forces in 1965. Heart-wrenching stories of the NVA executing wounded Americans got no mention in the War Crimes museum, nor did their favored targeting of medics and medivac helicopters. I also watched the indifferent Brad Pitt movie ‘War Machine’ about Afghanistan, which drew its own parallels to the Vietnam War; the people we are fighting are the people we came here to defend.

It has been said that the mistake the West keeps making is to assume we are the good guys.

There are always two sides to a conflict, always two views, even if objective analysis shows one to be in the wrong. ‘Zulu’ is a cracking film of bravery against the odds, but did the Good Guys win? The Good Guys clearly won WW2, albeit with the British carpet-bombing German cities, the Americans nuking Japan and the Russians throwing mercy to the wind as they closed on Berlin. Afterwards, the colonies and liberated territories simply wanted us gone. We view Liberal Capitalist (Christian) Democracy as the gold standard, but a huge chunk of the rest of the world does not agree. Capitalism is widely viewed as a Bad Thing and destructive of the environment, democracy is despised as weak, liberalism as decadent. Newly created democracies easily succumb to corruption, infighting and sham elections, turning the reign of the last dictator into some kind of golden age. Some religious groups even argue that government comes from God, not man, so democracy is fundamentally wrong.

Because we believe we are right, we gain the moral justification to act in our interests with all the power at our disposal. This view has probably triggered more conflicts than any other in modern history.

When writing, one can flirt with the opposing viewpoints of each side to avoid being simplistic. MI6 or KGB operatives are simply doing their job for their country, and the moral ambiguity of the spy thriller means that the line between good and evil is blurred. War movies and westerns from the 1960s onwards moved away from the flag-waver to the ‘anti-war’ movie where the enemy is human too. We even see clumsy attempts in terrorist fiction to get into the hearts and minds of the suicide bombers and jihadi killers; but for the meantime, they are the baddies, period.

Back in the dangerous and unstable real world we yearn for the simplicity of a 007 supervillain to fight. Our film fiction grasps at hollow victories snatched from a mess of inconclusive or disastrous interventions. Watching say ‘Black Hawk Down’ or ’13 Hours’ where flag-waving AK-toting gunmen are shot down like Red Indians in a 1950s B movie, we can see articulation of that simplicity; an against-the-odds mission to save your buddies amid a geopolitical clusterfuck. However, looking at those heaps of bodies of fighters at the end of the movie, killed in their own countries by foreign interventionists, we have to ask; are we the good guys?

Yes folks, I have a garret. My study is in the converted roof space of our bungalow. When we first moved to Serenity we created a little room at the back, with dormer windows overlooking the garden and fields, and almost but not quite a view of the Atlantic. Sounds idyllic, but it was not the best place to write. For one thing, the evening sun came straight in, making it uncomfortably hot and too bright to see the computer screen. All that light would surely fade my books too.

So I moved across to the north side, where a chimney had been removed and a velux window popped into the roof to replace it. The sun never comes directly inside, but above me the sky is bright and I can push open the velux and listen to the birds. Mostly it is shady and quiet, with no distracting views and the perfect place to write.

One could tell it was my room the moment you stepped inside. The furniture is all black, originally self-assembly black ash from the late 80’s which I’ve carted around and re-assembled after every house move. It is held together now by inelegant large screws, wood glue and positive thinking. Two showcases for my collections were purpose-built to match.

Five book cases are squashed in here – a stack of military history and ancient history dominates the room. My hardcore archaeology is in my museum office and my paperbacks are on the landing ‘library’ or over in the den. One shelf holds writer’s aids, dictionaries, a thesaurus and a bible. Below is a shelf of worrying titles concerning murder, forensics and various ways to kill people and then be found out afterwards. A steel filing cabinet holds paperwork, and a black set of drawers is so full of stuff they are reluctant to open any more. More spread into the corners of the room. I’mm sure you can imagine the random untidiness that creeps in.

What wall space is left, plus almost every surface, is covered in souvenirs of travel and random collecting. Native masks, a replica ‘Sting’, Great War medals and a couple of my framed book covers hang around the desk. My mother bought me a bust of Napoleon which sits by my elbow, and my sister bought me a cardboard robot as a joke present but he’s been a sentinel by my computer for a decade. Maybe 1,000 hand painted model soldiers of all periods of history stand in mirror-backed cabinets that double their ranks. Each reminds me of a day – or at least the year- when I painted it.

A pair of whiteboards carry the latest plot twists – but more of them anon. A leather firewood basket holds an assortment of cables, chargers and connectors, each with a different dinosaur on the plug to distinguish them; brontosaurus is for the mobile and so forth. A brass coal scuttle serves as a rubbish bin and never quite overflows.

Three computers are in use, sometimes at the same time. ‘Little Dell’ sits under the big black desk and is for my writing. Alongside is ‘Big Dell’, an older but hefty machine that is used purely for movie editing. As it isn’t connected to the internet and only carries four useful programs it doesn’t get clogged by constant updates or slowed by firewalls, so happily chugs onward despite still using Windows XP. Then there’s this machine (surprise!), my laptop, that sits on the bookcase next to Napoleon. I have a dicky back these days and have got used to standing up to work. Standing typing can be messy but it is a good place to do first drafts, emails, blogs and ‘waste time on the internet’.

Of course there are sundry heaps, and I have a shelf double-stacked with crime books I’m yet to read, but everyone has those, eh? Enough of the guided tour, it’s back to writing.

A New Year’s Day tradition for me has been to start a new novel, or kick-start one that has been slumbering as a few chapters in rough draft. A couple of hundred words will do.

This year I got ahead of myself. With the opening three or four chapters of ‘AW’ already in mind, I put down the first page three days ago.

NRT is done, as far as it can be before the next round of editorial comments come back. In the attached photo I am pondering potential titles for the book. Meantime the challenge is to write the follow-up. Not necessarily a sequel, mind. Who is saying that any of the lead characters survived? Perhaps their story arcs are complete.

What I’ve done is start plotting two follow-up books, using the same style and tone. Both are contemporary mysteries. Why two? Firstly because I have two ideas rattling around in my head that I want to explore. Also, although starting a story is easy, there is not always a middle to explore or a neat ending to be reached. Most real-world mysteries are solved extremely quickly or drag on for years in a mess of loose ends and inadequate evidence.

An author’s chat group ’10 Minute Novelists’ carried a story by one writer on how he uses whiteboards for plotting. To date I’d used ‘plot spiders’ scrawled on A4 paper, but this seemed like a great idea so whilst I was out Christmas shopping, I bought two.

The story with code name ‘AW’ hit a plot snag when I was two-thirds the way down that first page. A new whiteboard hung on my study wall is where I’m now planning my way around it. Perhaps the problem I hit as an author can simply be passed to the characters to solve? Meanwhile, I have both beginning and end in mind for the story code name ‘DC’ but need to think out a middle to tie both together.

So I’m daydreaming and doodling through post-Christmas television, starting to ‘remember’ the stories that have not been written yet. The chart on my whiteboard grows more complex, and I’ve opened two folders on my computers where the first ideas are taking root.

January is a hectic time at Guernsey Museum, as we turn around all the temporary exhibition spaces in three weeks. For me it means checking and proofing all the wall text, and numerous press releases. New Year’s Day is also when I like to pitch into the new book – NRT in the case of 2017

In an ideal world I’d skip February. It is a miserable month whose only redeeming feature is its brevity. I escaped to Barbados and hand-wrote some major plot twists of my new novel by the pool.

March saw the splendid Alderney Literary Festival, where I talked about ‘Glint” and signed a few copies. Mixing with the other authors of historical fiction/ non-fic/ biography was the highpoint though.

By April the literary year was hotting up, and I was off to Edinburgh for the annual conference of the Crime Writers’ Association. As usual it included talks by ex-coppers and criminologists on real-life cases; grim stuff like the ‘World’s End Murders’.

May saw both Bristol Crimefest (where I didn’t speak but met plenty of old friends) and the Guernsey Literary Festival (where I did both). I also interviewed Clare MackIntosh on her new book ‘I See You’; great fun, and only the second time I’d done a panel interview.

June’s big excitement was an emergency flight to Alderney to rescue what we could of an Iron Age burial ground sliced through by a JCB. Two days’ frantic work produced a wealth of finds that would keep us busy beyond the end of the year.

I was also back in Alderney in July, working ahead of a micro-excavator within the Nunnery Roman Fort. Enough evidence was uncovered to tempt me back in 2018.

It was my third visit to the Old Peculiar Crime Writing Festival in Harrogate in July. The last two had been blisteringly hot, but this time Yorkshire was grey and rainy. By now NRT was into its fourth draft, ready to start talking confidently about it to my crime-writing colleagues and send it to my erstwhile editor for a critique.

In late August, I went on holiday leaving Draft 5 in the hands of beta readers. I got off the Rock and headed for the wide open spaces of Wyoming, chalking up something over 2,000 miles in a fortnight. Plenty of iconic sites, but the ‘Great American Eclipse’ was an experience never to be forgotten; in Guernsey, Wyoming of all places.

Writing from a small island comes with its own challenges; 100 miles of water separates me from the mainland’s literary conventions, book fairs and library readings. In 2017 I took as many opportunities I could to combine a trip to the UK with a little literary interaction. September offered a chance to drop into the small but perfectly formed ‘Morecambe and Vice’ (“bring me some crime”).

The big October highlight was of course the CWA Daggers Awards Dinner, the Oscars of the crime-writing world. It was lovely sitting on the ‘New Blood’ table meeting the hopeful nominees and the eventual winner; I imagine we’ll hear more from all of them.

November was the 100th anniversary of the Battle of Cambrai, which features strongly in ‘Glint of Light on Broken Glass’. I engaged in a month of subtle promotion of the book on Facebook, and by nudging local shops. Interest in the battle in Guernsey had been minimal three years ago, but via a programme of lectures, museum displays, parades and living history events it was pushed into the forefront of Guernsey’s year.

So we came to December. NRT was finished, the final polish to Draft 7 being hammered out on my mother’s dining room table when I should have been socialising. Having discussed the idea the previous Christmas with London agent Annette Crossland. I sent off the manuscript and in a hectic couple of weeks I was signed up with A for Authors agency. Here we are celebrating at the CWA Christmas party. A pretty good end to 2017.

And the follow-up to NRT? The first page will go down on New Year’s Day. I’m also working on an artistic biography, our ‘Roman Guernsey’ book may finally see the light of day and ‘The Story of Guernsey’ will be published in German. A Merry Christmas and successful New Year to fellow writers, readers and friends everywhere.

It is with great pleasure that I can announce that I have signed up with London Agency A for Authors. I am looking forward to working with Annette Crossland and Bill Goodall on a new mystery series. 2018 is going to be an exciting year.

Whilst selling my books at a Winter Fayre this weekend I tweeted “I sometimes feel I’m too English for this”. I’m no shrinking violet, but when I first came into writing I felt uncomfortable pumping up my own books (and hence, myself). I didn’t have the ego to say “my books are great, buy ‘em”, and keep saying it. Of course, that is what we now have to do as writers. Some self-published authors I know claim to spend half their working hours simply promoting their books, via Facebook, Twitter, forums, attending book fairs and answering fan queries.

I might protest that I’m a writer, not a marketeer, but today a writer must be both.

Again, I attend various functions with the great and the good and generally resist the temptation to have a selfie with that celebrity. A well-mannered little voice tells me that they’re here to have a good time and the last thing they want is this six-foot curly haired chap wanting a quick snap to post to Twitter. However it is likely that the celeb has a publicist who is telling them to “get onto as many people’s social media feeds as you can, dahling”. The actors, musicians and writers who appear on the talk shows are not there because they have nothing better to do; they have a product to sell.

Gradually I have come to realise that self-promotion is not an end in itself, but an essential part of the industry we are in. Yes dahlings, you might think that novel-writing is an art form but publishing is an industry. Enough Englishness remains for me to be wary of ‘shameless’ publicity-seeking, but as time allows I’m now tweeting and blogging with the best. As we reach the 100th anniversary of the events central to ‘Glint’, I’m running a Facebook campaign combining appropriate images with teaser extracts from the book. I have no idea ultimately how successful this will be, but I know exactly what the outcome of doing nothing will be.

Promoting one’s books may not be the mark of a gentleman, but it is the mark of the modern writer.

We all hate Nazis, agreed? (If not, stop reading here). When I was a small boy, the ‘Germans’ were the baddies in our games, on TV shows and those stalwart WW2 films. Only when I began to study history properly did I understand the difference between the Germans as a people and Fascism as a creed. You could indeed have ‘Good Germans’, even in a WW2 context. In films such as Cross of Iron and Stalingrad, and the TV series ‘Das Boot’ and ‘Our Mothers, Our Fathers’ we see the war from the German side. We empathise with characters doomed to fight a losing war they no longer believe in, but we never empathise with the Nazis. Even when we are rooting for the German squad or submarine crew we see the shadow of the ‘hardened Nazi’, the Gestapo and the SS falling over the characters’ lives. The ‘Good Germans’ become victims too. There is plenty of room for ambiguity – are we really hoping that Oberst Steiner will kill Churchill in Jack Higgins The Eagle Has Landed?

A panel at the entertaining ‘Morecambe and Vice’ festival last weekend chaired by Guy Fraser-Sampson comprised Howard Linskey, Chris Petit and Luke McCallin. All have set novels in the context of Nazi Germany. The question was posed as how a detective story can be written against a background of escalating horror and atrocity that marked the Second World War. When millions are being systematically murdered, when people can be arrested, tortured and killed without recourse to legal process, who cares about a single body in the library or the theft of some countess’ emeralds? It is the job of the author to make us care.

The Nazis were intensely bureaucratic and whilst their leadership behaved like gangsters, pillaging Europe’s riches for their own enrichment, the lower tiers busied themselves with solving humdrum traffic offences, fraud, theft and ‘ordinary’ murder. The Germans had tiers of police and security services – not just civilian police, but also the Abwehr, Kripo, Gestapo, the SD, Sipo and so on making ripe territory for intrigue and setting tripwires in the path of any investigation.

Contrary to popular belief the Germans did not have a well-oiled efficient war machine. Nazis of all levels were spurred on by personal ambition, jealousy and fear as much as doctrine. Hitler encouraged jockeying for position between his officers. Inter-service and inter-departmental rivalry was poisonous, and putting a foot wrong could ultimately be fatal. McCallin’s Abwehr officer Reinhardt has to negotiate this political minefield to solve the murder of a high-profile woman in occupied Sarajevo. He remains the ‘Good German’ whilst others around him participate in war crimes with enthusiasm or at least allow themselves to be dragged along by the tide of history. ‘Only following orders’ many tens of thousands adopted a ‘grey morality’ simply to survive.

‘Great’ historical personalities such as Caesar, Alexander and Napoleon committed brutal acts that today we would call war crimes but the distance of time has dimmed the shock. All the world’s major nations’ histories hold atrocities to be ashamed of and there are a fair few men such as Ghengis Khan with the blood of millions on their hands, yet the Nazis hold a special place as the villains par excellence. Perhaps it is because their atrocities were so recent, perhaps because they were more visible than those of Stalin, or closer to home than those of Pol Pot. My Channel Island home fell under their darkness, and the rest of Britain so nearly fell too. The ‘what if’ of Len Deighton’s SS-GB came close to being a reality. The Czechs faced this horror at the hands of Heydrich, the subject of Linskey’s Hunting the Hangman; he shows up the contradiction in many Nazis, as when home from being a ruthless liquidator of undesirables Heydrich apparently loved his family.

The Nazis have become the poster boys for evil chic; smart grey uniforms, skull badges, black leather coats, sinister swastikas and screaming eagles. Unnervingly this still lends them glamour, shown by the auction value of SS-daggers and the like. Their uniforms contrast with the dull greens and browns of the Allies, their ‘wonder weapons’ contested against utilitarian Allied machines. History porn TV documentaries and books endlessly probe into their mystique. Their influence extends routinely into Science Fiction, especially the barely disguised ‘First Order’ of Star Wars Episode VII with its Stormtroopers and gleefully ruthless commanders. ‘Neo Nazi’ groups still strut around, forgetting how decisively the fascist creed was crushed.

Nazis become the enemy of choice in movies as diverse as the Indiana Jones series, ‘Captain America’ comics, to The Blues Brothers. It is so easy to cast Nazis as the bad guys that we writers must not become lazy. Yes, we know they are bad, we get it. Yes, the iconography oozes evil. Now make us care about the characters opposing them, or oppressed by them, or forced to co-exist with them; we know how Nazism ultimately fell, but the characters don’t.

So the draft NRT is back from beta-readers. The lovely things the trio said about the book were great, causing big beams of joy on my writerly face. The criticisms gave pause for thought. No, I’m not sharing – only the final version sees the light of day. What happens at beta-read stays at beta-read.

At first read-through an editorial critique of a draft can be daunting. Okay I take some comments with a pinch of salt, others can be easily adapted, but where there is a consensus saying essentially the same thing, those aspects need to be addressed. That means a lot more work on a story that already felt finished. I’ve asked a trio of people for opinions, and I have them. If there are faults, best address them now as literary agents and publishers take no prisoners.

A novel is like a cats’ cradle in that if you tweak one part, the rest trembles. More extensive structural editing is more akin to a game of Jenga; pull out the wrong block and the whole thing falls in a heap. Experimentally I deleted a whole scene, because I wanted to kill someone (not the editor, but the central character in the scene who would have been dead two days in the revised plot). Yep, that was the Jenga scene and whole chunks of plot blocks started to tumble down. Hastily I re-inserted it.

To get to Draft 5 has taken me 9 months and it feels heart-wrenching to start unpicking and rewriting. This is where the author takes over from a person who simply wants to write a book – some people I’ve met would have simply published Draft 5 as an e-book or KDP. It is not like starting again, though, and once I had that list of a dozen ‘must do’ edits morale soon spiked back up again.

The good news is that I have 85,000 words of pretty decent prose, a plot with beginning middle and end, a full set of characters and some near-perfect scenes that don’t need a jot of editing. Best of all, 85k is short of the 100k that a modern mystery should aim for. I have 15,000 words of headroom to develop that character, flesh out that subplot, and twist the middle a little more. The key danger to avoid is killing the cracking pace with 15,000 words of flab simply to tick the editors’ boxes. I was once asked simply to ‘make the book thicker so it looks better on a library shelf’­– that’s not the territory I’m in anymore.

So, draft 6 is underway. I’ve opened the bonnet, pulled out a few creaking parts and reached for the spares box. They say that the first page of your novel is never the first page when it finally comes to print, and with NRT that looks like being true. Rather than slipping into a gently escalating crisis, the lead character is now there on page 1, line 1 – and she’s in deep trouble.

Theakston Old Peculier have been sponsoring the UK’s biggest crime writing festival since the dawn of time (or so their PR goes). This was my third encounter with the crime-loving crowd packed (literally) into the Old Swan Hotel in Harrogate, venue famously of Agatha Christie’s mysterious flight in 1926.

Lee Child’s approach to writing intrigued me – he said he ‘never changed anything’, writing from start to finish without the waves of re-editing and drafts that some of us authors do. The audience wanted to quiz him on his reaction to Tom Cruise as Jack Reacher, but his stated view was that his book was complete – the film did not affect the book.

Crime writer panels asserted that the reader has an expectation that ‘order will be restored’ at the end of the novel, but there is a growing appreciation that ‘justice’ is not always served. The messiness of the real-life crime / resolution was freely bypassed by many writers.

Ian Rankin in conversation

Ian Rankin acknowledges the complexity of the work surrounding Rebus’ investigations but drops just enough hints that this other work is going on elsewhere to allow his detective to pursue the case. As much as we strive for accuracy, we know there are false aspects to many crime stories that require the suspension of disbelief. Former US prosecutor Alafair Burke says she ‘corrects’ the reader’s perceptions by allowing characters to make asides about the unusual aspects of the case; the protagonists know as well as we do that this is not routine police/legal work.

The ‘Dark Side’ panel considered the use of supernatural elements in crime fiction, with a consensus that ‘magic’ should not be used to cheat the reader but it was fair game for characters to believe in the supernatural and act as though it was real. It was acknowledged that even ‘realistic’ procedural police stories contain a great deal of fiction. The demands especially of TV shift our detectives away from reality. This led nicely to the historical panel ‘Ashes to Ashes’ discussing the limits of research. Essentially, if an author is unable to establish a historical fact it is unlikely that readers can either.

Ideas flowed in the panels, in the bar, in the fringe drinks parties and the beer tent. It was

difficult indeed to find slots in which to eat. One author proposed that she would not plan her novels ahead, so that twists sprung naturally and surprised her as much as the protagonists.

Steve Mosby suggested keeping a ‘Bad Ideas’ file, on the grounds you might one day need them. There was tension between the idea of keeping a character running from book to book in a series, or burning them up in a standalone novel leaving them broken.

To cap it all came the late night panel ‘Where The Bodies Are Buried’, a free-for all loosely chaired by Sarah Millican with Mark Billingham, Val McDermid and Lee Child. Head buzzing with ideas (and wine) I can’t even start to re-hash the crime-tinged jokes. However, one uncanny fact was that a certain US politician raised his orange-tinged head in almost every panel during the weekend. Everyone agreed we live in strange times – perfect for crime and thriller writers!